Chapter Nine #2
He heard her move behind him. He heard the rustle of fabric, the sound of wet wool being peeled away from skin, the particular intimacy of a woman undressing in a room where a man was trying very hard not to turn around.
He opened the chest and pulled out two blankets, moth-eaten, musty, and held one behind him without looking.
Her fingers took it from his hand, and the brush of her fingertips against his made his breath catch despite everything else that was happening, despite the panic, the rain, the lost watch and the cold.
He stripped off his waistcoat and his cravat, and stood in his shirt and breeches, the shirt wet and clinging to his shoulders and his chest, the linen transparent against his skin.
The fire was beginning to throw heat now, uneven and smoky but real, and he sat down on the floor in front of it, pulled a blanket around his shoulders and waited.
She sat beside him. Her shift was all she had left, the white cotton damp and translucent, clinging to her shoulders, her arms and the curves of her breasts.
The blanket was wrapped around her but not tightly enough to hide everything, and he could see, in the firelight, the shape of her body through the wet fabric, the dark shadow of her nipples visible through the cotton, the curve of her waist and the flare of her hip.
He looked away, quickly, because looking at her body while she was vulnerable and cold and sitting beside him on the floor of a derelict cottage was not something a man who was trying to deserve her would do.
She was shivering: small tremors running through her shoulders, her hands tucked inside the blanket, her hair loose, dark and damp against her neck.
He put his arm around her and pulled her against his side, and she came, without resistance.
Her shoulder fit into the hollow beneath his arm as if the hollow had been designed for it, and her shivering slowed.
“Tell me about the watch,” she said.
He had not planned to tell her. He had not planned to tell anyone, because the watch and the portrait inside were private and the grief that connected the two was the most private thing he owned.
He told her.
“The watch contains a portrait,” he said, and his voice was quiet, and the quietness of it was not a choice but a necessity, because speaking louder would have cracked something that was holding him together.
“My mother. Painted the year before she married my father. Gouache on ivory, no larger than a sovereign. She died of a fever when I was eleven.”
Imogen did not move, did not tighten her arm or make a sympathetic sound or do any of the things that people did when grief was offered to them. She stayed exactly where she was, her shoulder against his ribs, and she listened.
“My father carried the watch after she died. He never remarried and never looked at another woman. The ton thought he was eccentric. His friends thought he was stubborn. His sister, my aunt Eugenie, thought he was destroying himself by inches, and she was probably right, but he would not stop. He would not put the watch away.” The fire shifted, a log settling, sending a small shower of sparks up the chimney.
“I asked him once, when I was old enough to ask badly, why he carried a cold piece of metal everywhere he went.”
He paused. The rain was steady on the thatch, the drumming of it so constant that it had become a kind of silence.
“He said because she had not been cold when she gave it to him.”
The sentence sat in the room. He had never said it aloud to another person before, and the saying of it changed something, lightened it, as if the sentence had been pressing against the inside of his ribs for eight years and had finally been given somewhere to go.
“He died eight years ago,” Ash said. “Not of anything in particular. The physician said his heart. But I think he simply ran out of reasons to keep carrying. The watch was the last reason, but it was not enough, and so one morning he did not wake up. The watch was on his bedside table, and I picked it up, and I have not set it down since.”
He had never told anyone this because it was difficult for him. Not Frost, not Devlin and not the succession of mistresses who had shared his bed and his body. However, telling Imogen was the easiest thing he had done.
“My uncle kept books,” Imogen said, after a while.
Her voice was soft, not matching his grief but sitting alongside it, finding its own level.
“After my father died, my uncle raised me. His library was the only place I felt entirely safe. He had a first edition of Crébillon, Le Sopha, two volumes, that he had collected over thirty years. After he died, the family debts took everything. The books were pawned. I was fourteen.” She paused.
“I have been trying to replace them ever since, and I have not managed it, because the edition he owned was rare and the booksellers who carry Crébillon do not carry that particular printing. I keep looking anyway, because looking is the only way I know to keep the library alive.”
He listened to her the way she had listened to him, without movement, without commentary, and the exchange sat between them; her grief and his grief, offered without performance and received without judgment.
She moved before she had decided to. He felt the shift of her body against his, the turn of her shoulder, and then her face was close to his, her breath warm on his mouth, and she kissed him.
Not the kiss from the corridor or the conservatory or the library.
Something quieter, more desperate and more honest than any of those.
It was a kiss that tasted of rain, smoke and the particular salt of a grief that had been held for too long.
He pulled her against him without thinking, put his hands at her waist through the wet shift, and the kiss deepened while the fire crackled and the storm went on outside as if it had no intention of stopping.
His mouth left hers and found her throat, then the hollow of her collarbone, then lower, his lips tracing the line of her shift where it clung to the curve of her breast. He kissed her through the fabric first, his mouth at her nipple through the damp cotton, and the sound she made was new, different from all the others.
It was lower, less surprised and more like surrender, and the surrender went through him and made his hands tighten at her waist.
Then he lifted the edge of her shift and put his mouth on her bare breast. The first contact of his lips against her skin with no fabric, no barrier, just her warmth, the taste of rain on her body and the softness of her against his tongue, made him groan; a sound that came from somewhere deep and involuntary and filled the small cottage.
He worshipped her. There was no other word for it.
His mouth was at her breast, his tongue circling her nipple, his hand sliding up the outside of her thigh through the wet linen of her shift, higher than he had ever touched her, and his palm was against the smooth warm skin above her stocking and below the place where the shift ended.
Her legs shifted apart, just slightly, just enough, and the shifting was an invitation he had not asked for but that she was offering anyway.
His hand moved higher; his fingertips were against the inside of her thigh, and she gasped.
Her hand came up and gripped his shoulder, and her fingers dug into the wet linen of his shirt and held on.
Her other hand found him through his breeches.
Knowing this time, not surprised the way she had been in the conservatory but deliberate, seeking; her fingers traced the hard line of his member through the wool, and the touch was confident in a way that made his breath stop, and his hips press forward against her palm.
For a long moment they were both just touching each other and they were both trembling and breathing in the same ragged rhythm.
They knew that the line between what they had done and what they had not done was getting thinner with every breath.
He stopped it.
He stopped it because somewhere in the cottage, between the watch story, the Crébillon and the grief they had exchanged beside the fire, he had decided something.
Not with his mind, which was not capable of decisions at the moment, and not with his body, which was capable only of wanting her.
With something else. Something quieter, deeper and more stubborn than either.
He had decided that he was going to find a way out of the wager, and that he was going to come to her without it between them, and that when he finally had her, fully and completely, the way his body was demanding, it was going to be clean.
Not a wager. Not a performance. Not a game he had entered at three in the morning in a brothel with a courtesan in his lap and nothing in his heart.
He pulled back. His hand withdrew from her thigh, and his mouth left her breast. His body screamed at him for the withdrawal, his member aching, straining against his breeches, every nerve in his skin protesting the removal of her warmth.
He wrapped the blanket around her and pulled her close, her back against his chest. She didn’t resist. Though her breathing was uneven and her body still trembling, she settled into him.
His arm tightened to steady her, and he buried his face in her damp hair, breathing in the scent of rain and lavender.
“Stay,” she said, very quietly.
“I am not going anywhere.”
The fire burned down to coals. The rain did not stop. She fell asleep against his chest sometime around midnight, her breathing evening out, her hands wrapped around his forearm where it crossed her body, and he held her tight.
He thought about his father carrying a watch for years because the woman who had given it to him had not been cold.
He thought about Imogen searching for a book that had been pawned when she was fourteen because the library it came from was the only place she had felt safe.
He thought about how both of those things were the same thing, a person carrying a loss they could not set down, and about how he had found, in this derelict cottage in the rain, the first person in eight years who understood why the carrying was the point.
He thought about the wager. The five thousand, the chestnut, the deadline, the betting book and Devlin’s face in the side hall at the Asquiths.
He thought about what Devlin would do if he learned about the cottage, about the shift, the firelight and the sound she had made when his mouth found her breast, and the thought made something in his stomach tighten with a cold nausea.
Devlin would use it. Whatever he learned, however he learned it, Devlin would use it, and the using would hurt her, and hurting her was the one outcome Ash was no longer willing to permit.
He was going to end the wager. He was going to pay Devlin the five thousand, give him the chestnut and walk away from the betting book and come to Imogen with clean hands. He would tell her everything and hope that she would forgive him for not telling her sooner.
The rain stopped at first light. The sky went from gray to pale to the thin gold of a June morning, and the meadow outside the cottage was soaked and silent, and the watch was still out there, somewhere in the wet grass, waiting.
He did not wake her. He sat with her sleeping against his chest and watched the dawn come in through the cracks in the shutter and the holes in the thatch.
Her breathing was slow and steady against his arm.
Her hair was drying against his collar, dark and soft, and the smell of it, lavender and rain, was the most peaceful thing he had encountered in a very long time.
Outside the cottage the birds were beginning, one by one, tentative after the storm, testing the silence before committing to song, and the sound of them was ordinary and beautiful.
He listened to them, held the woman who was sleeping against him and realized that the decision he had made in the night was still there, settled and certain.